Hoboken

Yes, what a silly name for a city, but that's where we live, and it's better than our Northern neighbor, Weehawken. I thought ya'll might like a little info about our new city. (By the way, I'm having a very hard time not saying, "ya'll," but I'll have to stop because I'm getting pretty tired of repeating myself. One "ya'll" in a sentence and everyone acts like they didn't understand a thing I just said.)

Hoboken has about 40,000 people stuffed into one square mile, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The streets are fairly wide, room enough for four cars across, but most of the streets are one-way. So, there are two lanes of parking on the outsides, one lane of double-parking (which can be on either side and sometimes causes problems), and hopefully one lane is left open for moving cars. The major two-way street in town, Washington, can fit six lanes of cars, so each side has parking, double-parking, and hopefully some moving traffic.

Theoretically, Hoboken is easy to navigate. All streets are in a grid, and the numbered streets (1-14) run East-West. Unfortunately, all the one-ways and buildings that take up 2-3 blocks make it a bit of a maze. So, we've started to opt more and more for walking, but we'll see how long we hold out, since the winter weather will probably make the car increasingly tempting.

The first officially recorded game of baseball in US history was in Hoboken in 1846 between the New York Nine and the Knickerbocker Club. (Guys, seriously? You're just asking to get your pansy knickerbockers knocked off. I don't know who won, though.)

Frank Sinatra is from Hoboken, and every year, there is a sound-a-like competition in Sinatra Park.

Carlo's Bakery of the Cake Boss TV show is in Hoboken, and on the weekends, there's a line 2 blocks long to get into the tiny shop.

In the Northern part of town, I've even seen a warehouse full of giant plaster animals and vegetation, which I assume will either be part of the Macy's Day parade or a giant's lawn decoration collection. --In fact, I just looked up Hoboken in Wikipedia, and yes, Hoboken is home to the Macy's Day Parade Studio! Because why would Manhattan waste space on plaster sculptures bigger than a $800,000 condo? Send those things to New Jersey.--

As late as the 1960s, though, Hoboken was actually a cruddy industrial port with slum-like housing. In the 1970s, NJ built a new port in Newark and an Interstate that connected NJ to NY, bypassing Hoboken and leaving the little town obsolete. It wasn't really until the 1990s that NJ started to reclaim the waterfront, build open park spaces facing the NYC skyline, and encourage commercial real estate. Now, Hoboken is considered a "bedroom community" of Manhattan, since most of its residents sleep here but basically live in Manhattan. You can get to Manhattan by subway (called the PATH train), ferry, or bus in 25-45 minutes.

I will say that Hoboken is growing a bit of its own downtown entertainment, though. It has a cute main street, lined with small shops, Italian restaurants, and a few Starbucks. There are even a couple bars that do live music and such. And there is a brand new movie theater! Five screens, that's right.

I hope you all (ugh, takes too long to type) enjoyed getting to know more about Hoboken.

Moving, Goin' to a Wedding, and Pumpkin Hunting

We've moved to New Jersey! We're 30 minutes from Chad's job in Manhattan but in a less dense urban area, so it's a good compromise. Cora has enjoyed the moving process much more than we have. Boxes, books, clothes, shoes, and all sorts of grown-up things have been scattered across the floor (first the Nashville floor, now the NJ floor) for weeks, giving her a make-shift playground. She's crawling, pulling herself up to standing, gnawing the bindings off books, and grabbing every sharp-looking object she can reach.
Since we'd sold much of our furniture in Nashville, we first made a stop to Ikea up here. Actually, we made several stops to Ikea and ate a delicious meal every time. After probably 15 hours of driving to, shopping at, and eating in Ikea, we built a table, a desk, and a wall of bookshelf/cabinets. Before and after:
We're not quite finished. We'll mount the TV to the wall and put two glass shelves above it to make the height even across. Of course, Cora was quite helpful in the building phase.

 

 After we'd been at our new place for all of 10 days, we jetted off off to Texas for the wedding! It was awesome to see family and to not have to worry about unpacking and such. Cora was, unfortunately, a little grump right before and during the wedding. I suppose it's my fault, since I've trained her so well to take naps throughout the day, and her screams echoing off the church walls was just her way of saying, "I didn't get my nap today!" Well, she was only loud for about 10 seconds, but to the mom of a screaming baby, it always sounds louder and lasts longer. Really, everyone said she was quite cute and content. And she loves it when you blow in her face!

We went from 80 degree Texas heat to 55 degree New Jersey fall weather with an icy breeze. Nothing makes you want apple cider and pumpkin pie more than gray, chilly air. So, we found a farm further into NJ that lets you pick your own pumpkins, and off we went! We let Cora crawl around in the pumpkin patch to find her own. Well, we actually rolled one to her, and she grabbed on to it with a smile. It sure seemed like that was the one she wanted.

Now we have three pumpkins on our balcony, awaiting the carving knife!

Prague

So, then there was Prague!
Prague was beautiful. I'd heard that before, but I was still surprised. There weren't really any areas of town that didn't have gorgeous 4-6 story gothic or renaissance-style buildings on the sides of the comfortably wide streets. (Well, there was the one sketch dark alley way that Kathy led us down, but we'll overlook that moment.) It was, however, amazing that there were no crazy tiny streets, all were plenty wide enough for pedestrians and traffic! The main square was, of course, pedestrian only.
The first day, we did a city tour with our favorite tour group, Free Europe. They have native English speaking guides that do free tours of major cities throughout Europe every day. It was a good introduction to the city in 4 hours.
The three next days, we tried to plan our own activities. For our time at the city castle and cathedral, we rented one audioguide for the four of us and had Kathy's super informative guidebook photocopies, so we passed along information and Cora between us. We went to the lovely Strahov Monastery on a hill, overlooking the city. It had a library, famous for it's floor-to-ceiling shelves of ancient texts. As a nice surprise, the monastery also has had a brewery since the 1400s, and they still brew an excellent dunkel! So, we just had to partake...
Lest you think all we did on this trip was drink beer, we did take a day trip to the nearby Karlstejn Castle, which was lovely and even authentic enough to have defended itself against two sieges! At this point, we discovered that Cora really did not like tours, since the tour guide lady basically asked me to keep our kid quite or leave. Heh...

--> Baby travel note: Even when Cora was only a little grumpy, she was too loud for most indoor tours. City walking tours we could do just fine with her in her Kelty backpack, but if we wanted any chance of being in a museum, castle, etc, we had to bring the baby bjorn and plan on being able to leave the room if she squirmed too much.

We also spent a day in the Jewish quarter and visited a synagogue given to the Jewish residents by the Andalusians in Spain, so it had beautiful, geometric, hand-painted designs covering the interior. (Sadly, no pictures allowed.) We generally did a fair amount of just wandering the streets, which were really scenic everywhere we went.

The only negatives to Prague were that it was not as cheap as we had hoped, and restaurants stop serving dinner around 10pm. We typically tried to go back to the hostel for a late afternoon nap, but that meant we'd nap from like 5-7, then feed Cora, then try to find a place to eat. By 9 or 9:30, restaurants stopped accepting new customers, so several times we found ourselves begging the waiter to take pity on a poor pregnant lady and get the cook to make us a pizza. It generally worked, but we must have looked pretty desperate. Oh, and these conversations took place in English, since obviously I know zero Czech. Prague was touristy enough that English was prevalent.

So, all-in-all, a fabulous destination, and even after 5 nights there, we felt like we'd just barely seen most of the city. But, it was time to move on to Krakow!
The Charles Bridge and Prague Castle at twilight.